Throughout his rise to becoming one of the most influential CEOs in artificial intelligence, OpenAI’s Sam Altman made repeated bold assertions about the impact that the new technology would have on jobs. 

He has said that AI will “probably replace most of the jobs people do today,” that entire job categories will be “totally, totally gone,” and that those impacted by the dramatic shifts will “find all sorts of new things to do".

Now, however, Altman appears to have changed his tune, saying he is “delighted to be wrong” about the impact AI would have on employment.

"I don't think we're going to have the kind ​of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about," he said during a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney on Tuesday. 

“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened," Altman said. 

“I now think I understand more about why it hasn't, ​and I'm obviously grateful, but that is an area where my intuitions were just off.”

Altman went on to explain that the “human part” of employment could not be replaced by AI, and that people care about interacting with each other at work. 

"We really do care about our interactions with people,” he added, which he said—for better or worse—"updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought."

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.

What changed Sam Altman's mind? 

Altman’s apparent about-face comes at a pivotal moment for the AI industry. Three of the biggest AI companies on the planet are heading towards public offerings: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are planning to soon ask for investor cash to meet eye-watering growth targets. 

OpenAI aims to reach $280 billion in revenue by 2030, up from $25 billion today.  SpaceX is hoping for a $1.5 trillion valuation in its initial public offering (IPO). And Anthropic is reportedly in talks to secure $30 billion in funding with a valuation of a $900 billion, according to the Financial Times. 

Despite those numbers, there have been signs that some companies are struggling to find value in AI use. 

Uber's President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Macdonald, also said in a recent podcast interview posted May 22 that it is becoming harder and harder to justify AI costs in the company. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, went viral in April for admitting Uber burned through its 2026 Claude Code budget in four months. 

Last month, Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, suggested that AI use isn’t actually saving companies from labor costs, and could cost them more than the humans they currently employ.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he told Axios.

Microsoft, too, has raised concerns about the costs of AI. The company has reportedly begun canceling licenses for its engineers to use Anthropic’s Claude due to high costs, raising questions about the costs of adoption. 

Economists differ widely in their beliefs about whether AI will actually lead to a “job apocalypse.”

“Forecasting economic impacts from AI is inherently speculative and uncertain, and the economists I’ve talked to disagree on how much it will reshape the labor market," Peter Wildeford, Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network, tells TIME.

"One of the most uncertain aspects," he says, "is ‘reallocation’: if you imagine AI completely automates away some categories of work, do those workers stay unemployed, or do they find new professions?”

The differing opinions among among economists are also largely due to adoption happening more slowly than technological advancement. A recent Brookings report found that “rapid advances in AI capability are not translating automatically into broad economic gains or meaningful adoption.”

“In the medium term, AI adoption is also likely to be costly and uneven,” the report found.

The Yale Budget Lab, which has also been tracking AI’s effect on the labor market, found in a May study that AI was likely not the reason for a weakening in the labor market, and that there has not yet been a meaningful change in unemployment through March 2026 for workers in jobs with high AI exposure.

But after his early doom-laden predictions, Altman may now be an outlier among industry leaders in playing down the impact on work. 

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said last year that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will dissolve within the next five years, and unemployment could skyrocket to 10-20%.

"We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei told Axios in 2025. "I don't think this is on people's radar."

At the TIME100 Summit last month, business leaders and CEOs argued that AI will revolutionize entry-level jobs. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said that the “lowest rung on the ladder has been pulled away by AI” when discussing how customer service work in his company is now being done by AI.

It is true that thousands of jobs are currently being cut in the push for AI, mostly in tech companies. 

Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May— about 10% of its workforce — and scrapped thousands more positions it had posted, citing a shift to AI as the justification. Financial software company Intuit cut 17% of its staff, or 3,000 people, this month. Amazon and Alphabet announced rounds of layoffs as they made a push for greater AI adoption and efficiency. 

Artificial intelligence has been cited as justification for nearly 50,000 job cuts through April this year, according to research by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.  

“Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements. They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Wildeford, of the AI Policy Network, suggests one potential reason for the change in tune Altman's tune: public opinion.

“Public opinion research has made pretty clear that Americans feel quite negative about AI,” he says. “The AI industry, and in particular Sam Altman, has responded with an about-face: it’s not going to replace most white collar workers, it’s actually going to create tons of jobs, and any pain along the way is temporary. It’s hard to say whether they’ve actually changed their forecasts for AI’s economic impact, or whether they’re just trying to change the narrative.”